Past MPhil Dissertations

Past MPhil Dissertations

Heritage Studies as been taught at the University of Cambridge since 1990 as a specialism within the MPhil in Archaeology. However, from 2019 student will be admitted into a stand-alone MPhil in Heritage Studies. We are understandably proud of the graduates that this programme has produced, who have gone on to lead many areas of the field and industry. To recognise the quality and originality of the work produced by our MPhil students we select several of the top dissertations to feature each year, giving a sense of the great breadth and depth of our discipline.

MPhil Dissertations 2017-18

This research attempts to understand how identity and heritage interface with each other in the colonial context of Bonaire in the Dutch Caribbean. By exploring common understandings of how identity and heritage interact, this work applies theories of Indianness, a felt identity based on the adaptation of indigenous populations to a dominant society. Through the critical analysis of interview data in the context of a heritage survey and a historical analysis, this paper finds that heritage and identity production and maintenance are intimately related to colonialism on Bonaire. While many participants designated heritage based on a feeling of Indianness, there was an opposing group of interviewees who instead contested indigenous heritage and searched for historical and scientific legitimization for their heritage and identities. The research concludes that bottom-up understandings of heritage and identity formation are necessary to effectively manage heritage in colonial contexts.

This dissertation looks at the enforcement of legal instruments governing the protection of heritage and the extent to which such enforcement mechanism may be useful for the protection of heritage. It delves into the Reparations Order in the Al Mahdi case to see how the International Criminal Court constructs the notion of victims in the aftermath of the destruction of heritage sites in Timbuktu. This construction entails (i) the identification of victim groups; (ii) the assessment of their harm; and (iii) the determination of reparation type and modalities. Scrutinising the Trial Chamber’s use of the World Heritage Convention, this dissertation reveals gaps in all three areas, privileging local victims at the expense of national and international victims. Wide discretionary powers were found to have chiefly motivated the Court’s uneven analyses and could adversely affect its decisionmaking in future cases. In spite of its limitations, the Court demonstrated usefulness by achieving some expansion in its remit in the protection of heritage and through its role as a figurative “loudspeaker” in publicising the punitive consequence of heritage destruction to the global public.

This dissertation focuses broadly on how groups own a shared history, whether through doing so by legal property rights or by intellectual or cognitive ownership. It uses examples of material that by its nature is an assemblage from a variety of groups, and indeed at the time, different worlds: ships and their associated cargo between the ‘Old World’ and the ‘New World’ from the 16th to the 19th century. Because these wrecks carry the material of multiple nations both past and present, and due to their locations in international water, ships offer unique opportunities for stakeholders to emerge beyond the boundary of the nation state, which often defines archaeological ownership. Rather than shipwrecked assemblages or ‘treasure’ representing just one category of value, be it monetary, national, or educational, these ‘amphibious’ pieces link both land and sea, public and private property, and tangible and intangible heritage. Using interviews with curators and experts in the field of underwater cultural heritage, a case study, and two databases of shipwrecks with their associated material and ownership battles, the discussion will reveal the tension of owning colonial cargo, and the need for a solution that calls for co-owning hybridity.

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